All right, I am finally going to ask the question that's been bugging me ever since I learned English as a second language more than 20 years ago.
Which is: why?
Why does the English language considers it correct to place punctuation inside the quotes in such an example? What's the grammatical explanation?
I am a professional linguist. I work reviewing and proofreading text that is sometimes read by literally millions of people. (I work for a big company.) And I still don't know what's behind this baffling grammatical rule.
The way I see it (and the way I've been taught in my native language, Portuguese), the quotation marks serve a single purpose, which is to contain the words or thoughts that belong to anyone else other than the writer. Whatever is inside these useful marks, belongs to someone else. Right?
"Hm", you are thinking. "Maybe this person has a point?" I thank you and I continue: in the above sentence, who does the comma belong to? Is it to your thoughts? Or to the structure of my sentence? The character I cheekily named "you" did not think that comma. They thought "Hm", and then they thought something else.
And this goes not only for creative writing, but also for journalism! It's so common to read an article that ends with a quote from someone else, and then the final punctuation mark, the ending period, the fullest of the full stops, is contained within that quote. Robbed of its impact. It could be anchoring the entire piece, but it got relegated to simply anchoring that quote. These articles feel unfinished, to me, when I read them.
If I ever end up going on record with a journalist, I will request that none of my quotes are used to finish an article in such a way. I am not responsible for whether your piece sticks its landing. Quote me all you want, but write your own damn punctuation.
Anyway. Bit of a rant, there. Apologies.
I would love it if anyone would be willing to explain this whole punctuation inside quotation marks to me in a grammatically satisfying way. There must be a reason I'm not aware.
